Wednesday, 4 July 2012

BRITAIN'S VIETNAM? A FOURTH OF JULY SPECIAL: The FT review of A Few Bloody Noses

NOTE: I wrote this review for the Financial Times eight years ago; it must be one of the last book reviews I did for them, and I'd hate to think it was the cause. As you'll see, I thought the book did best things it didn't necessarily set out, or even want, to do, so as I say, it sometimes seems to be arguing against itself. But Harvey provided a new perspective to think about the Revolution, & the concept of Britain's Vietnam is one that makes more and more sense to me. So because I came across it in my files again just before the Fourth of July (or as the Brits call it, Thanksgiving) I thought I'd share it with you now...

History is not always written by the victors; imperial powers often get to rewrite
defeats in their favour. This should be kept in mind when Robert
Harvey points out Britons have been unusually silent on the subject
of the American Revolution. Although Harvey sets out to debunk what
he says are myths cherished by most Americans, and, as he says,
‘creation myths are the strongest’, he also concedes that some
pretty comprehensive debunking has already been done by the Americans
themselves. And in fact, A Few Bloody Noses is most fascinating when
it delves into British perceptions of the war.

Harvey
calls America ‘Britain’s Vietnam’, an apt and telling
comparison. It's a comparison he reinforces with his own emphasis on
the actual tactical conduct of the Revolution’s few major battles,
which reminds one of revisionist histories of Southeast Asia. For
example, Saratoga may not have been the overwhelming victory
Americans claim it was, but arguing against its symbolic importance
is like arguing the US really ‘won’ the Tet offensive. Saratoga
gave the revolution momentum at home, credibility abroad, and most
importantly forced Parliament to reconsider how winnable the war
might be.

In
fairness, Harvey makes such points himself, even though his making them
is somewhat self-contradictory; that's true of any number ofissues. For example, he asserts the colonists
already possessed more freedom than the average Briton, thus
dismissing revolutionaries as frauds at the same time he concedes
that the greater freedom they did enjoy is by nature
self-perpetuating. He castigates the Americans for their skill at
‘spinning’ their side of the war, yet recognises such spin arose
because, unlike in Britain, the revolutionaries needed public support merely to fight, much less win, the war. Harvey
emphasises a low level of popular support for revolution, while
recognising that, like the South Vietnamese, many colonials sat on the fence,
waiting to join the winning side, while others merely capitulated to
ruling power. Harvey will accept some American myths when they suit
him, but that can prove dangerous. For example, the myth of the heavily
armed yeoman farmer springing to the American cause had been debunked
not long before this book appeared, by Michael Bellesiles’ Arming
America.

Harvey’s
first major triumph is the outlining the many successes but ultimate
failure of British military strategy. Here, the story of Saratoga (that's the British surrender pictured above left) suggests he might also have drawn a striking parallel to the Second
World War. ‘Gentleman Johnny’ Burgoyne’s campaign was the
Revolution’s equivalent of Operation Market Garden, a daring but flawed
plan conceived primarily to allow its creator to outshine his rivals.
Harvey corrects the American attribution of victory at Saratoga to
British incompetence, asserting ‘professional jealousy’ was the real cause.
But surely allowing such jealousy to overcome strategic common-sense is
the essence of incompetence! In case it isn't, Harvey also details enough incompetence in other areas to nullify his original point. Interestingly, Burgoyne’s reputation,
unlike Clive’s or Byng’s, but very much like Montgomery’s, was
sullied not a whit by the failure of what was supposed to be his
masterstroke.

Harvey
also demonstrates convincingly George Washington’s importance as a
leader, as well as a myth. Washington won few major battles, but his
crossing of the Delaware and wintering at Valley Forge are America’s
equivalents of Dunkirk. Indeed, America has not always wrapped
itself in the cloth of invincibility; its two most crucial
battle myths of the 19th
century, the Alamo and Custer’s Last Stand, are both defeats, as is
the myth of Pickett's Charge for the Confederacy.

Washington
was patient, until, when necessary, he moved quickly and with focus.
His decisive action in marching to reinforce Nathanael Greene at Yorktown contrasted
directly with Sir William Clinton’s inaction, and was the single
stroke which won the war. He also understood politics, surviving
numerous plots against his command. Continuing the World War II
analogy, I was struck by how closely Washington resembles Eisenhower.
“His greatest virtue appeared to be his dullness,” says Harvey,
but like Ike, he possessed the perfect temperament for unifying
disparate and unfriendly factions for a long haul.

Harvey’s
other great success is bringing to light episodes American history
prefers to neglect. Although Massachusetts recruited black soldiers,
the colonials soon banned them from their armies, fearful of
encouraging slaves to leave their masters. The British quickly did
exactly that. Nearly a century before Lincoln’s Emancipation
Proclamation, the Earl of Dunmore, then governor of Virginia, offered
freedom for any slave who fought for the crown; ‘Lord Dunmore’s
Ethiopian Regiment’ joined and fought on the British side; many
black veterans and refugees from slavery found their way eventually
to Nova Scotia. The Revolution also provided an excuse for colonists
to ignore Britain’s Proclamation Line, beyond which land was
reserved for Indians.The colonists waged war ruthlessly against those
Indians, most of whom sided with the Crown, in a grim foreshadowing
America’s relentless expansion west.

About
other atrocities, however, Harvey becomes much more circumspect. The Paoli and
Waxhaw massacres, perpetrated by British regulars, lead him to
conclude only that 'occasional excesses occurred on both sides’.
Although conceding General Alexander Leslie ‘distributed’ some
700 negroes infected with smallpox to plantations in Virginia, he
allows that this primitive biological warfare ‘would have been a
crime indeed’ only if Leslie actually had infected the slaves
himself! He seems unaware Lord Amherst had pioneered such tactics
two decades earlier, by 'donating' blankets taken from smallpox
victims to unsuspecting Indian villages. The British army saw to it that whole tribes were
ethnically cleansed by disease.

His
book also contains some strange errors. Far from 'disappearing from
American myth', John Hancock’s name remains a synonym for signature.
Marching west from Lake Ontario would hardly bring one to the Hudson
River, which lies well to its east. Numbers are used oddly;
Cornwallis’s rearguard at Monmouth shrinks from 6,000 to 2,000 men
in the space of two paragraphs. Characters are frequently
reintroduced redundantly. Ethan Allan is described as the ‘thuggish’
leader of ‘a band of hillbillies’; on the very next page he is
introduced again as ‘hillbillyish’. He was indeed more of a thug than American history cares to admit, but a hillbilly? And, in a book loaded with
assertions, the lack of footnotes is frustrating.

It
may not have been his intent, but Harvey actually succeeds
better than he intended in embellishing the reputations of Washington and such
neglected rebel leaders as Greene (pictured left), Daniel Morgan,and Henry Knox, rather than debunking any major American myths. In the end, however, as a direct descendant
of leaders on both sides of the Parliamentary argument, Harvey
succeeds best in giving us a kind of Pentagon Papers view of the
British war effort, something that is more than two centuries
overdue.

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